Man Earns $100,000 Serving Clients on $5 Website

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Can you make a million dollars, five dollars at a time? What about $100,000, five dollars at a time? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host, and today's story features one of the most successful service providers on Fiverr that I've ever seen. Fiverr is famously, or sometimes infamously, the service that allows people to exchange services starting at just five dollars.

And today's featured case study is a graphic designer who earns more than $100,000 on the platform, and for the most part, it's not by doing graphic design. This guy discovers he has a real knack for naming things. Businesses, products, events, books, even the name of a fake medicine that will be the cure when the zombie apocalypse arrives. So a true story, of course, this guy earns more than $100,000 naming things, beginning by doing it just five dollars at a time, over and over and over. This episode also contains a bonus challenge for you at the end, all in less than 10 minutes, so let's say thanks to today's sponsor and then stay tuned.

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If you ever looked around a store and thought, hey, who comes up with all the names for these products? Well, if so, you might be interested in learning about today's side hustler. Graphic designer Dion Link was looking for ways to increase his income. He'd always wanted to earn a million dollars, and he knew he'd need multiple streams of income to achieve it. After all, he'd heard that the average millionaire has at least seven.

He'd also recently learned about a platform called Fiverr, where anyone could offer a service for sale at the low price of just five dollars. He was unsure if he could reach his million dollar goal with a five dollar limit on his earnings, but intrigued to see what the potential could be, Dion decided to create a gig and run a test. Confident in his ability to be funny, Dion offered to tell people a joke in exchange for five dollars. It was a quirky idea he didn't expect to perform well, but he was surprised by the response. Within a number of days, a number of people had commissioned five dollar jokes from him.

He figured there might be more to this platform than he first thought. Plus, every five dollars that was added to his account was a step closer to his million dollar goal. Having tested Fiverr's potential, Dion wanted to create an evergreen skill he could use to make money well into the future, because as much fun as the experiment was, he figured he might run out of jokes. He needed to find a skill that could be done efficiently for the lower price tag, but would still provide value to the customer. It needed to be a win-win for both of them.

The more he thought about it, the more he kept circling back to the same idea, the idea of naming products. From his work in graphic design and helping companies with their branding, he knew that naming products was a problematic part of the marketing process. Giving the right product the right name can make the difference between a best seller and the bargain basement. If he could help people with this problem, he felt he'd be opening his arms to a lot of $5 bills. So here's what he does.

In a nutshell, Dion promises to provide a brilliant name for your product, invention, business, or book. It will be a unique name with no repeats, and it's designed to match your branding. Startup costs for this business were a grand total of, let me see, gotta add some stuff up here, oh, $0. That's right, a $0 startup cost. Fiverr takes a percentage on the money you make, but otherwise there are no expenses.

To market his services, Dion focused on free channels, including guest blogging and blog commenting. Guest blogging allowed him to put his Fiverr gig in front of audiences who create products. He noticed that many of the people who purchased his service were stay-at-home moms and dads, so he began writing blog posts for the sites that audience reads. For example, he wrote a guide to making money on Fiverr for the website Single Moms Income, which brought a lot of targeted traffic his way. Commenting on blogs also helped.

Dion would find blog posts relevant to people who had used his services and then leave a comment at the bottom of the post. This comment would be relevant to the article and usually add his thoughts or ideas that something that had been mentioned. The people who read his comment could click and be redirected straight to his Fiverr page. Aside from these tactics, Dion soon noticed that the best trick to becoming a top seller on Fiverr is to deliver high-quality work consistently. The more he focused on the quality of his product, the more referrals and repeat business he received.

Being able to openly display excellent feedback and reviews on his product page went a long way, 'cause there's nothing like social proof to help you make more money. So now, let's approach a topic that many of our listeners might be wondering about. Can you really make real money at $5 a person? While much to Dion's delight, Fiverr eventually allowed sellers to increase their prices and offer multiple services. This meant he would no longer have to work at just $5 per gig.

He next settled on three packages. His basic package cost $35 for three names. His standard package cost $65 and delivers three names with taglines. And his premier package cost $95, which promises everything from the other two packages and a .com domain to go with it. He set his prices based on conversations with previous customers, as well as work he'd done outside the platform.

All of this together has helped Dion earn over six figures on Fiverr, and so far he has created names for over 5,500 different clients. Some of his favorites include a fake medicine for a novelist, and this medicine will be a cure for the zombie apocalypse. He named it Sir Rivlin, which is Nile virus spelled backwards. He also named an anti-mosquito wristband he called Swatlet. Those are just two examples, he also has 5,000 more.

Now some advice to you, when it comes to naming a product, Dion's secret is to keep it simple. Not all businesses need a clever or sexy name. It's often better to find the tried and tested techniques in your industry and then stick with those. So if you're starting a law firm, your law firm, whatever your name is, will always be relevant, whereas Bitcoin lawyers probably becomes dated at a certain point. We got some other advice from him and we'll link it up in the show notes for you.

Looking to the future, Dion is still striving towards his million dollar goal. On the side, meaning his side side hustle, he recently invented a product of his own. Last but not least, he also wants to learn more about how to invest all this money that's coming in. Maybe that's a $5 service someone should provide. [Music]

Fiverr can be a great place to experiment.

And by the way, it's Fiverr, like with two R's at the end, because I guess fiverr.com was not available. Don't forget that extra R. So it's a great place to experiment. It's a sandbox, essentially. If you've never sold anything before, if you've never performed a service for money, definitely go and check it out.

It can be a fun thing to do. You'll probably learn something along the way and you'll get paid for it, even if you don't get paid very much. Now, if you have another more creative idea, like some of the stuff I talk about pretty much every day or at least four or five days a week on the show, an idea to make something of your own that doesn't depend on an existing platform, then I think you should probably work on that instead. So in this case, Dion is a rock star. He has been very successful with Fiverr, but it also seems to me like if you were starting out now, doing something like this is a lot of grinding it out.

Okay, and I respect the grind. I respect just working hard, doing the same thing over and over, really building all those testimonials and reviews. But again, all things being equal, another idea might be better for you. Remember, the most important side hustle skill you can acquire is creative thinking. Just being able to come up with ideas like what we talk about on the show every day.

So in fact, here's a good exercise for you. Here's a challenge. Even if you have no intention of signing up at Fiverr or offering a service there, ask yourself what you would do if you suddenly had to. All right, so in this scenario, you have to offer a service to at least 10 people in the next 30 days. And this needs to be a specific service, something that might work on a platform like Fiverr, where people are buying and selling things every day.

And if you wanna take it further, ask yourself, what if you suddenly had to make a living doing that? What would that thing be and how would you do it? I don't wanna scare you. I'm not saying you need to go and become a full-time Fiverr provider. I just wanna get you thinking.

Be resourceful. What would you do if you had to offer a service to at least 10 people in the next 30 days? If you do wanna sign up for Fiverr just to check it out or read more about Dion. He's got an ebook for sale. He's got a few other resources.

Just come by our show notes page for today's episode. That page is, let me see. Oh, it's 521. This is episode 521. So that page is at sidehustleschool.com/521.

Don't forget, as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you've got a comment or question for the show, feel free to give me a call anytime on the Hustle hotline. You can leave a little voicemail. It is 8449 Hustle, 8449 Hustle, or 844-948-7853. You can also send an email at podcast@sidehustleschool.com.

Thank you for listening. I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.